


Betwixt Wizarding and Muggle Worlds

by PureBatWings



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Books, Childhood, Chinese Food, Christmas, Church of England, Correspondence, Divination, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Homophobic Language, Owls, Reading, Runes, implied referenced child abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-07-22 18:57:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7450414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PureBatWings/pseuds/PureBatWings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Severus learned about the alphabet and about magic. His eighth Christmas brings a mysterious visitor, a letter and an invitation for mother and son..</p><p>Usual legal disclaimers apply. Not my characters, not for money, no copyright infringement implied.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Alphabet of Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One March day when he’s four and pestering her she sits with him the kitchen table and starts teaching him his alphabet. “This is the first letter of twenty-six in our alphabet. A is like a witch’s hat. And A is for…?”

**January 9, 1963:**

He's three today, his Mum tells him, a big boy. They go out and play in the back garden most days even though it’s cold in early January, just past Three Wise Men’s Day. He catches snowflakes on his tongue and it’s his first memory—swirling snow around them, trying to catch the sparkling snowballs Mum throws to him before she bustles him inside, gives him a hot bath, a snack and cocoa before his naptime.

Mum says he’s clever. Mum says don’t bother your father when he comes home tired from work or the pub when he’s had a few. At bedtime, she often sings him a song about a little green snake that slithers through the emerald green grass and even though he’s a young hatchling, he’s smart and waits for the unwary boys who caught and teased him once so he can bite their heels. She sings it so all the Ses in the song sound like hissing. Severus thinks it’s brilliant that even small creatures can fight back.

There’s an even sadder song she sometimes sings about three ravens and a dead knight who has a faithful hawk and a dog that lies down at his feet. Ravens are smart, Mum says.

Just watch the crows that are their cousins, they always know what’s going on in the neighborhood, and she imitates a crow’s alerting caw so well it makes him jump and look around. Mum reassures him, showing him her hand and arm, “See? No feathers.”

After that, he starts paying attention to birds and plants and living things. In the summer Mum’s garden gives him bugs to check out and butterflies to catch among the flowers and juicy tomatoes to taste off the vine and all sorts of smells—mint, lavender—that make his nose tingle.

In autumn they talk about migrations and birds and why we get colder weather and warmer weather. He gets a blue pullover sweater and a grey flannel peacoat from Oxfam and a scarf with green and black stripes that Mum made to keep him warm as it gets chillier again.

**Spring 1964-late 1965**

One March day when he’s four and pestering her after his nap as she tries to read another murder mystery, she sets down her copy of Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison, sits with him at the kitchen table and starts teaching him his alphabet and which words start with which letters.

She prints a capital A for him on a piece of scrap paper. “This is the first letter of twenty-six in our alphabet. A is like a witch’s hat. And A is for…?”

“Apple!” says Severus, who ate half a Pippin apple for lunch with a bit of cottage pie.

“Clever boy. And capital B looks like the two half circles stacked together, B is for…”

“Biscuit!” He likes Hob Nobs. “Bangers and mash!” “Big brave boy.”

He scarcely cried when he fell and scraped his knee yesterday on the garden path’s rain slicked bricks.

“That’s right. C is curled like a cat’s tail, in French a cat is un chat. Tell me what else starts with C?”

“Cartwheels. (Something he can’t do when the occasional lost lorry comes down their dead end street, Spinners End.)

“Another word?” she prompts.

“C is for Cokeworth, yes?” he asks.

It’s the sooty town where they live. There’s usually a tinge of grey to the sky from coal fires in the winter and the factories by the murky river the rest of the year.

Sometimes the dark smog makes everyone cough and people try to stay indoors on those days. Peasouper fogs, Da calls them, but he doesn’t explain when Severus asks him what peas have to do with something grey and wet.

C is for cooking and Cadbury’s hot chocolate. Except when Dad’s home drunk or mad, Severus has Mum to himself and she teaches him things while she cooks casseroles or concocts tinctures and beauty products that the neighbourhood ladies buy.

Sometimes people pay her in coins which she hides carefully away for his future schoolbooks and for feeding her film addiction. More often, she’s given foodstuffs like meat that they can rarely afford, or hand me down clothing for Severus, who is tall for his age.

“It’s a good thing, this trading,” Eileen tells him, “this way your Da can’t drink up the pair of long underwear that will keep you warm this winter.” He giggles at the picture of gulping clothing and his Da choking on itchy wool.

“Now tell me, Severus, what words begin with D?”

“Dangerous dog.”

They met a scary one, loose in the park one day last week and it growled at him and looked like it wanted to eat him or Mum. But Mum had twisted her fingers in a strange gesture and threw a spark of light in the dog’s direction. It yelped, jumping back like it had been smacked on the nose, and ran away.

 _“Cave canem_ , indeed,” she murmured in satisfaction, as they resumed their walk and he took her hand. Sometimes small snakes needed bigger snakes to protect them. One way to be smart was to know when you needed someone else’s help, Mum said.

“Mum, what’s that mean?”

Every day he spent a lot of time asking her the meaning of words she used that he didn’t know. She never told him to stop pestering her with questions, and only sometimes told him she would tell him later when he was older. This week his favorite word was gormless. It was a northern expression, a different way of saying “stupid.”

“Beware of the dog. It’s in Latin, a language you’ll probably end up needing to know. Dogs are also called canines—as are wolves. Werewolves are another story for another day.”

She shows him where his canine teeth are and says that he’ll get his grown up teeth starting when he’s six or seven. She tells him about snake fangs and beavers’ teeth and vampires’ fangs and basilisk fangs and all sorts of teeth and why they’re different and the different things animals do with their teeth.

They spend the next month or three talking about teeth and different animal defenses and weapons and which creatures eat which foods. Almost anything can be a weapon, if you have knowledge about how to use it correctly, she tells him.

She reads him books from the town’s lending library about teeth and skeletons and sharks which don’t have bones. It’s very important to brush your teeth and keep them clean so your breath doesn’t smell.

They play the alphabet game every day. Now he’s got more D words—Dad, drunk, December, duck the bird and duck the verb, dodge, darts like at the pub and dart to run away fast; and another word for a stupid person that he happily rolls off his tongue over and over: dunnnn-derrrr-head.

E is for Mum’s name, Eileen, and E starts the words egg and extract and England.

She draws him a rough map, a way to find your way to places you’ve never been before, if the map is detailed enough. There is London, in the bottom right on squiggly Thames River. Here’s Stonehenge and Avebury, and Manchester, Coventry, Cokeworth and Newcastle.

This dot is York, up top to the north, and way, way up, off the paper and into their dirty breakfast dishes is a special castle in Scotland called Hogwarts that she’ll tell him about when he’s bigger and learned his capital letters.

She calls him her Young Prince or My Half-Blood Prince when he says something especially clever.

“Silly Mummy, you’re not a Queen!”

She smiles and tells him she used to be a Prince before her marriage to Da; that was her family’s name.

“But you weren’t a real prince, not like the Queen’s baby, you’re a girl.” He saw pictures of Queen Elizabeth (another E name!) with her new baby Edward (lots of E words), in the newsreels when, as a special treat, they went to the afternoon cinema together.

Mary Poppins’ bottomless carpetbag and Bert the Chimney sweep led to her mentioning expanding charms and Floo powder. He doesn’t get it at all, but Mum says that’s okay, he has years to learn about things.

His mum adores dark films where murders get planned and happen or birds attack people and films where smart spies like James Bond narrowly escape being caught by the Bad Guys. His father will sometimes watch war films and westerns, anything with guns and explosions (another E word to add to his list).

Eileen goes to see a matinee of _Goldfinger_ as a treat to herself and a neighbour lady keeps an eye on Severus along with her own brood of five. Severus comes home with yet more questions.

“Mummy, Mr. and Mrs. Pridgedon didn’t have any books in their house, isn’t that funny? There are so many more people than books there, not like our house at all and why do they have so many children and here there’s just me? And when can I go to the theatre with you? I want to see another film.”

“She’s a kind lady to watch you for me. The next time you go over, I’ll send some of that salve I make for skin moisturizer with you to pay her back. Some people just don’t like books, Severus,” she adds with a disdainful sniff.

He looks at her like she’s grown another head. Her answer distracts him from his other questions. “How can you not like books? They’re neat, they teach you stuff!”

He decides people who don’t like books are stupid. And since they don’t read, they must stay stupid.

Their own house is stuffed with books. Some are mum’s books; some are school books of his dad before he went to work at sixteen. Still others, dozens of musty dark brown bound thick books with pictures of skeletons, veins and muscles belonged to his father’s father who was a doctor until he did something stupid, lost money and died over in France around the First World War.

Severus has a shelf of his very own books in his room—a lot of Ladybird books for children, Beatrix Potter, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Alice in Wonderland and a reserve shelf of ones to read when he’s older—the Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien and one big one with stories of Mum’s favorite detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Da is stupid and mean. He only reads the sporting pages of the local paper and curses when his team loses. Then he drinks another beer. He tells Severus to shut it when Severus tries to tell him about the ants he found at the park or what Mum said about noses. Severus is usually fast enough to duck Da’s backhand after his third beer.

Tobias tells Eileen to stop reading all the goddamn time and making goopy medicines and starting acting like a normal wife and mother. “You spend too much time with Sev, he’s such a mama’s boy he’ll end up bent, Eileen. And no son of mine’s going to be a faggot. Send him out to play, he’ll make some friends that way.”

Faggot is an F word, like fuck and fucking-- that grownups like Da sometimes use when they’re furious or drunk. Severus is not to use such words or Mum will wash his mouth out with soap, the kind that stings and really gets rid of dirt by taking half your skin off.

Privately he makes a list to himself of words Da says, but Severus is not allowed to repeat.

“Bloody, bleeding, wanker, god-damme, hell, fuck, shite, piss, whore, homosexual, faggot, queer, bastard…”

Mum says there are better ways to insult people, and if you have to curse them, let it be a real curse, or an insult with words they don’t quite understand. She’ll tell him what all those forbidden words mean when he’s older. Like one hundred. He isn’t sure if she’s serious or not.

F is for four and five. Severus wonders if it would be fun to have a brother or sister when he sees The Sound of Music. He doesn’t think he’d like all the fighting that siblings seem to do, like at the neighbours. And he wouldn’t want to perform singing about a silly flower on stage, either. Mum tells him Edelweiss represents courage or daring in flower language. He still thinks the song is dumb and a younger sibling would probably be a pestilent brat (something his father has called him at times, so he figures pestilent is Not Good and adds it to his List of Cool Insults.)

Garden begins with G. In warm weather he helps Mum with her garden. She grows all sorts of herbs and vegetables and plants in their backyard between the kitchen door stoop and the shed at the bottom of the garden which was an outhouse until indoor plumbing was put in before he was born, a few years after the Second World War.

Now the shed holds spades, and shears, a rake and stakes to tie plants to and a calendar with his Mum’s planting notes on it and there are dried flowers and herbs hanging from the rafters. Mum is a dab hand, with green thumbs and fingers, say their neighbours.

“I studied Herbology and Perfumery in Paris after school and before I met your father,” she explains to Severus as they take a break and drink cool water in the shade of the apple tree.

Their back garden is strange, Severus thinks. It looks to be a space not more than perhaps fifteen feet by twenty, but its inside is much larger than its outside. There is a greenhouse that shouldn’t fit in the space, but it does.

“I’ll tell you about it when you’re older,” Eileen says. Severus thinks that stinks, he’s smart, he can understand most of what she says to him. She should tell him now.

There are some other weird things he’s noticed about Mum and their house and he has asked her about them, but Mum says only, “Silent as the grave,” mimics turning a key over her lips and tells him he can help her with weeding if he has that much time to think about all that’s strange in the world.

Mum says she loves him, and he needs to learn all he can. She talks French to him sometimes, which he starts to pick up a word here and there and she tells him he’s smart enough to be a doctor or chemist or barrister. He won’t be stuck in Cokeworth forever if he studies hard and keeps learning things.

Mum promises by Merlin’s beard he won’t be trapped here, she will see to it. He wants to know everything. It’s an amazing world, and a bigger one than just Spinners End and his father’s anger. He’s seen an exciting, different world in his mother’s movies and books.

Eileen sets her son to help her prepare the soil for planting. He pulls the grasses she points out and the spiky leaves she calls weeds. He piles them on the brick walkway that bisects the kitchen garden by the back door and the rest of the land. These will go into the compost pile to make more good soil and to feed the earthworms.

She talks about sage and mint, basil and anise, and their uses to heal people or flavor food. They tie bundles of plants up to dry and Severus learns the H word harvest as he helps his mother preserve jams and put away vegetables for winter stews.

H is for Halloween, haunts and Hobgoblins. Eileen and Severus carve turnips and put lit candles inside and put them in their windows to keep away the ghosts that come around this night, when the barrier between the worlds thins.

Severus is reading easy children’s books. He loves that he’s growing up and he’s really reading, not just looking at first letters and guessing at what something says from the pictures.

Not long afterwards, in November, there’s one night Da’s temper suddenly flares and he’s trapped by his parents struggling in front of the door he could use to escape, like his mother told him to do when Da gets angry. “Run away, if you can. If not, hide, little snake, until Mama Snake can come get you.”

He crouches down, as small as he can make himself when Da lets loose with his fists on Mum. He cries soundlessly, so no one notices a small scared snake behind the sofa.

Tobias’ voice is booming and he’s calling her words that would get Severus a mouth washed out with soap. Repeatedly. Severus sticks his head out a bit to see if he can make a break for it.

Da grabs Mum by the arm and pulls her hair and keeps yelling and shaking her. All Severus can think is, “Shut up! Shut it! Stop it!” at Da when he feels himself flushing with anger and choking, there’s a crackle and heat and a sparkling ice-blue flame like alcohol on a Christmas pudding and suddenly the room’s silent aside from Mum’s heavy panting as she pulls free from a meaty hand’s grip on her upper arm.

His father’s mouth opens, but no words come out. After some interesting faces of frustration and fear, he hits Mum, grabs his throat and dashes from the room. They hear the front door slam a minute after that.

Severus looks up to see his mum holding her bruised cheek and smiling at him through her tears. She says, “I’m sorry you saw that, my Half-Blood Prince, but forget it. This is a wonderful day. You did accidental magic and froze your father’s vocal cords, my love. That’ll take a while to thaw. You’re a wizard, Severus my Prince, not a squib.”

She gives him a fierce hug and spins him off his feet even though she’s scarcely a foot taller. He’s glad mum’s happy with him, though he has no idea why or what exactly he did.

“He needed to shut his bloody mouth,” he said sullenly, pulling free from her close embrace so he can look her in the eyes. “I hate him, we don’t need him. We’ll leave and go somewhere else like London and I can get a job and I’ll protect you.”

His mum pulls him into another hug. “I love you, darling, but you can’t stay to protect me forever and I can’t leave him. I’m married to him, for better and for worse, much like a binding vow. You’ll be off to Hogwarts in only six short years and there is so much I need to teach you before you get your letter.”

Mum tells him about Hogwarts, where she went away to school at eleven, and its four houses. “Princes almost always end up in Slytherin. But Ravenclaw would maybe suit you too. The Sorting Hat talks to you in your head and then decides, your first night there at the Welcoming Feast, where you belong.”

**1966:**

Since he is magic like Mum and can read, Eileen pulls out her childhood books for him to read. “Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump” “Young Wizard tales” and “Young Witch stories” and they get even more library books every fortnight—stories of dragons, folk tales, ghost stories, the Wizard of Oz, Greek myths about fantastic beasts.

There are things he hasn’t seen that she tells him about. It’s a secret just between the two of them, don’t tell, not even Da and when he goes to Muggle school he can’t let people there know about their special world either.

He starts to wonder about why Wizards have to hide from Muggles and why families are so different to each other and his mother starts to teach him about the Wizarding World.

There is a whole world, an alphabet of secrets, that he can’t tell anyone.

A is for Amortentia and yes, apple. But some apples aren’t like the Garden of Eden ones, there are magic ones found in the Western Isles, Tir Na Nog and Avalon, where the wizard Merlin, who was very real, visited a long time ago with another A, King Arthur.

A is for Azkaban, the Wizard’s prison on an island in the northern seas. Few prisoners get out alive or sane.

B is for Bezoar which cures most poisons and comes from the stomach of a goat. Belladonna—she shows him a picture of the plant—enlarges the dark part of your eyes and makes people sleepy.

B is for the Black family—“distant pureblood cousins of mine,” says Mum. When he asks why he hasn’t met them she falters a moment, then says, “My family didn’t like that I married your father, so they don’t visit me anymore and they don’t want us to visit them.”

B is bludgers, and bats and the Black Death with its song about Ring a Round a Rosie.

C is for cauldron and cutting knives for herbs and, more prosaically, for cooking soup which hits the spot so well on those wet winter days when the icy rains sheet down in windy gusts and it’s impossible to play outside without nearly drowning. C is for Charms and clockwise and counterclockwise ways of stirring soups and unguents.

D is for the story of Death and the three brothers who tried to live forever and D is for Dark Lords who usually become other D words: despots or dictators.

She tells him about Grindelwald during the Second World War and the wizard Dumbledore who defeated him. That sounds scary, so they talk instead about the dog she scared away last spring and smalls spells that even young witches and wizards can use to protect themselves or in emergencies when no one’s around.

She tells him about Dragons and Dementors, which he decides are way scarier than Dark Lords. That night she has to give him a draught of Dreamless Sleep when he wakes up screaming with a nightmare that his soul’s being devoured. The Dementor has Da's face.

E is for Excellence. Mum says he needs to do well in school so he can get a scholarship to study when he’s an adult and 17. Seventeen sounds very grown up to Severus, it’s years away and way longer than he’s been alive.

Mum teaches him basic maths as they measure and cook things.

E is for Etiquette or manners. You never touch another person’s wand without asking. You never offer your wand to another unless you are agreeing to serve them or in an emergency. There are different ways to address the son or heir of a noble family versus a merely wealthy one.

F is for family. Blood and bloodlines are important to understanding the wizarding world, like Burke’s Peerage is to aristocratic British muggles. She tells him about the Noble and Pureblood families and draws spidery line charts showing who’s related to whom, who has alliances with whom, the last she knew. There are light wizards: families like Weasleys and Potters and Longbottoms. There are grey families like Sprouts, Pettigrews and Pomfreys, mostly from Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw Houses and there are families that tend to have an affinity for dark magic—Princes, Blacks, Malfoys… Most wizarding families have only one or two children. A family with more than three children is rare.

The garden and potions she makes in their linoleum floored kitchen (that stays clean with charms so she has time to read) are all part of the Wizarding secret world. Mum’s a witch, like he’s a future wizard.

Magic can’t solve everything, though. When he asks Mum why she doesn’t turn Da into a toad, she grows solemn and says she won’t do that, it would cause problems with the Authorities, both Muggle and Wizard.

Can she magic them a pile of gold to spend? No, it’s one of the fundamental rules of magic that you can’t create money or food or water out of nothing. You can summon things or transform things, but it’s a different thing to accio a drink from your kitchen which has a faucet. So is creating a spring to bubble up if you have the knack for earth magic and some accommodating ley lines in your vicinity.

Da may drink too much and sometimes smack them around, but he pays the bills. Mum has nowhere else to go since her family disowned her for marrying him, and she doesn’t have many close friends. Severus hates that his father yells at him and Mum, especially after he’s gone a few rounds at his local. The house is so much quieter and calmer when he’s gone. Sometimes his mum gets a black eye and bruises that need healing salve. The doors she accidentally walks into greatly resemble his father’s fists.

Severus is a wizard even though his dad is a muggle, a non-magical person. That’s why he’s called a half-blood. Because of something called the Statute of Secrecy, Severus can’t say anything to anyone about magic unless they also have magic. How he’ll figure out they are a witch or wizard if no one is supposed to talk about it, he doesn’t know.

In addition to all the books, Eileen tells him her family’s stories. “You remind me of my brother sometimes, my Prince,” she says, her hands a blur as she chops leeks and onions and carrots, peels potatoes and preps a cock-a-leekie soup for supper.

Severus raises his head from a book about mushrooms, edible ones and poisonous ones. After this, he’s going to read a kid’s book about plants for potions his mum used when she was a second year girl. He pushes his dark shaggy hair back behind his ears and peers over at her as she finishes prepping.

“I have an uncle? Do I have any cousins?”

“You _had_ an uncle, he’s been dead longer than you’ve been alive, _mon brave_.” She settles herself at the kitchen table after putting a kettle on the hob for tea time. “Janus was your uncle, my older brother. He died before he could marry or beget heirs. He lived for one thing—to bring our family back to prominence and he paid for it with his life.”

Severus keeps silent. Mum doesn’t like interruptions when she’s telling him about the Wizard World, because her stories often hold hidden, but important lessons, sort of like Aesop’s fables. The wise ant he read about last week sounds like a Slytherin who planned and plotted, while the carefree grasshopper sounds like a Gryffindor, living brashly, on the fly.

“Now, my mother was German, her family came over to England in the last century when the Muggle Prussian Chancellor Bismark was busy invading places all over Europe. She made my father, who was from a British wizard clan, promise that Janus would be sent to be educated at Durmstrang, a Wizarding School, not far from the Carpathians.

We lived in England, not too far from here, but it was decided that the Heir Prince should get a broader world view, so perhaps he might get a start in mother’s family’s medical supplies business. Not everyone can learn the charms and spells to locate and source, for example, good ancient Egyptian mummy bandages. It’s not easy like going to the chemists to fetch aspirin for a headache.

So, Janus, who was more than ten years my senior, went to Durmstrang and fell under the spell of one of his teachers, Gellert Grindelwald, who was a devotee of the Dark Arts. He convinced Janus and many other students and youngsters that allying with him would bring Wizards greatness once more and that one of the ways wizards might gain land and power again was to eliminate most of the muggles.

They don’t give us _Liebensraum_ , Janus was always complaining in his owl-carried letters home, so we need to take it by fair means or foul.”

Severus risks shifting in his seat. “ _Liebensraum_?”

The kettle whistles and Mum makes them each a mug of tea before settling across from him to resume her story.

“German. Living space. Janus said Gellert was crafty, he planted seeds in muggle brains and schemed with Wizard and muggle politicians alike. After the Great War, the one your da’s father died in, a huge influenza epidemic killed more people in two years than four years of all-out war had accomplished.

Gellert kept aiding muggle rabble rousers—it didn’t matter what they said they believed. His plan was to start an even bigger war and set an even more deadly stage for a massive epidemic if the war didn’t kill enough people. Janus served Gellert by slipping funds and information to German groups, helping the Nazis consolidate power.

After Gindelwald’s defeat by Dumbledore, many wizards insisted on trials for war criminals. Janus was one of many kissed by Dementors. The Light only cared to punish those who had been on the losing side and used their Dark Arts knowledge.

Janus died soon after in prison and left me the only Prince of our generation. My father was in so much grief he began searching for Dark Artifacts to bring Janus back from the dead. We think he ran afoul of a roc in Arabia, there weren’t many pieces left to bury of him.”

Severus sits and thinks. He can look up what an epidemic is in the dictionary in their house, so he asks another question instead. “Was Janus being with the Dark Lord why you went to Hogwarts instead of Durmstrang?”

“Yes, my mother believed in hedging her bets, so she sent me to the school where the eventual victor Dumbledore taught and later became headmaster. She encouraged my budding interest in potions and perfumes. I was to “fly under the radar” as muggle pilots put it. I was expected to make a brilliant marriage alliance, preferably with a Ravenclaw heir. I didn’t have to be on the side of the light, I just had to appear to be at least grey and not interested in the dark arts like my brother.”

“Why couldn’t you show people you were smart too?” he asks after some consideration. Grey made sense, it gave you options. Grey was like a camouflage for wizards. Of course appearing dark would scare a lot of people and that might be even better…

“My mother was a traditionalist and I was just a girl. I wouldn’t have gotten schooling beyond Hogwarts, except I convinced her that I would do more husband-hunting than potion ingredient hunting in France.” She smiles a devious smile. “I didn’t want a brilliant but loveless marriage like my parents. I wanted a man who could make me feel intensely alive. What did I know, I wasn’t that old.”

“But why a Muggle? Da doesn’t even like to read.”

She shrugs. “He swept me off my feet when I was home on vacation from my studies in Paris and it was the lure of the forbidden, a dark brooding muggle who was attentive, jealous and possessive when I even glanced at another man during a date.

Well, I thought, I’m nearly forty—your dad thinks I’m in my thirties, not approaching fifty, by the way-- I should get married and have a child. I thought my parents would eventually forgive me for following my passion. I didn’t take my contraceptive potions and here you are. Not long after that I learned what a bad temper he had.”

Severus thought having a baby was probably more complicated than forgetting a potion. He didn’t quite get what all the steps were between wanting a child, being married and then waddling like a swollen-stomached penguin down high street like Mrs. Pridgedon seemed to do every other year before another baby showed up in its pram.

“I don’t like babies, they scream and smell nasty,” he says. You could hear anything in their house—it was small, and he could hear Da yelling at Mum in their bedroom most weekends and Mum crying, even when he hid under his bed with a pillow pulled over his head. He still really didn’t get why Mum never used magic on Dad. She could hex him and then obliviate him, after all. Tobias wouldn’t remember and Severus wouldn’t tell anyone.

**Autumn 1966:**

He’s six, he starts muggle primary school. His favorite jumper is acid green, he wears that on the weekends. The annoying thing is the other children. They’re babies, they scarcely know their ABCs, much less how to read the books he’s been devouring.

He’s one of the older and taller kids in his class, so while they think he’s weird, they don’t tease or bully him—yet. That starts a bit later when they catch up to him in height.

His teachers like that he cleans up his messes. They’re amused when he says, very seriously in his high voice, “Messes can cause ‘plosions, Mum said so.” His teachers assume someone in his family worked in a munitions factory during World War II.

The teaching staff think he is bright, but moody. He doesn’t relate well to his peer group. “A loner, not a team player,” comments one teacher on his report cards. His mother snorts at that one. “Teams are for dimmer Hufflepuffs who can’t make it on their own brainpower.”

“Finishes work, but reads in class. Should get more outdoor exercise,” writes the maths instructor. His mum mutters about Gryffindorish Muggles and testosterone and annoying heartiness.

His marks are excellent, and he’s polite to adults, but gets poor deportment marks because he insults his classmates sometimes and “should improve his attitude and make some friends.”

**1967:**

Severus learns all he can about the muggle world at school, about TVs and Radios and what the Space Race is. His da gives him a small transistor radio as a gift, so he can hear BBC radio news and popular music like the Beatles and the Merseyside sound. It gives them something to talk about over supper sometimes. His Da loves the Rolling Stones especially “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction” and “Under my Thumb.”

But living or talking with his father is always a bit scary, his temper could blow at any time. You feel like you’re doing a balancing act, like trying to coax a Hungarian Horntail dragon into giving up her eggs while avoiding becoming an appetizer.

Tobias hasn’t hit him that much since last year when Severus made him lose his voice, but his son isn’t taking any chances and sits beyond arm’s reach whenever possible. He knows better than to cheek his Da or ask him questions.

Tobias mutters under his breath about damn queers getting rights when they should be jailed. Mum tells Severus later that it matters less to wizards who you love, either witch or wizard. It’s important to find someone who is as powerful, or more powerful than you to form alliances with, including who you fall in love with, if you can possibly help it. She didn’t marry a wizard and you can see for yourself what a problem that is.

Severus is not invited to join in football matches at recess or to play in the riverside park after school with the other boys. The girls think he’s weird and his clothes look odd and old fashioned. It doesn’t help he snarls at them to leave him alone when someone tries to interrupt his reading as he sits under the shade of the willows. He doesn’t want just anyone for a friend, he wants a friend he can practice charms with and talk about muggles versus wizard families.

At home, he reads books intended for fourth years at Hogwarts and, with a whippy willow stick, practices the motions he needs to accompany hexes and jinxes. Forewarned is forearmed. He practices running fast and staying inconspicuous at school so the muggle bullies won’t notice him too often and can’t catch him when they do.

He knows running won’t work at Hogwarts if he’s hit with a Jelly-legs jinx, so he reads Defense for Beginners and tries to learn how to stay alert in all sorts of situations and how to walk quietly. He needs to be smarter with faster reflexes than anyone, Muggle or Wizard, so he can control situations and avoid getting thrashed.

**Spring 1968:**

Lots of famous American men get assassinated the year he’s eight, one is named King. He wonders if muggle Kings are related somehow to wizard Princes, but he bets not, otherwise a protective spell might have helped the man stay live. The Americans and Russians are both trying to be first to land on the moon. Sometimes his father’s newspaper mentions spies in Berlin or the Red menace.

He knows each of the Hogwarts houses have their colors, in the same way the planets have their symbolic colours. Red is for Mars and fire signs in astrology like Aries, Leo and Sagittarius. Red means danger and blood and stop in traffic signals. Red is the first colour created in muggle languages after black and white. Expensive rubies are pigeon’s blood red, garnets come from Bohemia. Gold is used to colour glass red.

He asks his mum about the Reds in the paper. “Nothing to do with Gryffindors,” his mother says. “Those sorts of Reds—it’s a muggle type of government. And, by the by, the cowardly lion in those Oz books you are inhaling is satire. Gryffindors are brave for the most part, sometimes foolhardily so when it comes to taking a stand. It’s better to watch, wait, gather information and plan and thus stay alive. The saying should be “Spilled guts, no glory.”

They go out to the park and pick violets for violet water.

"We need at least four cups’ worth," says Eileen. "I want to make some to sell, I’m going to need to pay for your robes and a real wand fairly soon." Severus helps her gather violets while watching two sisters, one about his age with flame-red hair, play tag and then hide and seek.

He thinks they might be in his grade or the grade behind him. There’s something different about the younger girl (her sister screams her name Lily in frustration, when she is found). The air seems to waver around Lily while her dark haired older sister doesn’t have anything magic about her at all. Maybe this ginger haired girl could be his friend…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song about the ravens dates from at least 1611 and can be found in many versions  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Ravens . I first heard countertenor Alfred Deller’s version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7BptN19_5k There’s a darker version known as the Twa Corbies (Two Crows) that I don’t think even a Slytherin mom would sing to her four year old.


	2. The Solstice Visitor

20 December, 1968:

“Across the pond, NASA is in the final stages of preparing the Apollo 8 mission with astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders to begin the first manned Moon voyage tomorrow and now for the latest reports out of Parliament in Westminster, London…”

Impatiently, Eileen turns off the radio and looks at her son who’s reading _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_ at the kitchen table. “Bring in the laundry from the shed’s lines, it’s going to storm later tonight and you’ll want an extra warm blanket for your bed come morning.”

She goes back to scrubbing a particularly stubborn spot of grease on a frying pan. The leftover sausages will be part of their breakfast tomorrow. Tobias didn’t show up this evening—he doubtless went down to the pub tonight since it’s a payday Friday and good riddance to bad husbands.

Severus sighs dramatically. “Yes mum,” he says, sounding tragically put upon, but he sets down his book and slips on his pea coat, which is a bit short on him. He takes Mum’s wand from her apron pocket as she continues to scrub.

He goes out the kitchen door into the moonless back garden and flicks on the torch. It emits a feeble yellow light that is barely enough to allow him to distinguish the brick path from the few remaining kale plants, dead flower heads and the vegetable patches with their browning snakelike dead vines.

After a few minutes’ walk, he pushes his way into the shed and flicks on the overhead light. He takes the step stool from its place by the south facing window, stands on it and unclips the sheets and blanket that have been drying in the unnaturally warm space. The wooden clothespins go in an old large tin can on the potting table. He folds the bedclothes and puts them into the basket by the door and puts the stool away.

“ _Finite incantatum_ ,” he says and swishes and flicks his Mum’s wand, ending her heating spell. He wishes he could use _Lumos_ to get back to the house; he really doesn’t want to end up with the basket’s contents toppled on the ground, his body entangled and scratched by the blackberry brambles when he trips over a protruding brick because the torch’s batteries are nearly dead.

It’s the new moon tonight, so it’s very dark. Mum says no spells day or night outside in the garden, that would be ill-advised-- a nosy neighbor could be looking out a top floor window and see what she should not see: magic at work in the world.

There’s a muffled thump at the shed door as he's reaching for the light switch that makes him jump. Is Da home already? Silently, wand in hand, he cracks open the door and looks out into the night. A movement at his feet makes him jump back, pointing the wand defensively before he realizes it’s a just a very bedraggled looking short-eared owl.

He crouches down to see if it is injured and it half-heartedly pecks in his direction and hops into the shed before extending a leg with a letter attached to it. Cautiously he unties the missive, which is addressed to Eileen Prince, Spinner’s Lane, Cokeworth, England. The bird blinks wearily at him and puts its head under its wing, leaning up against the shed’s wall.

“I’ll be right back with some water and meat,” he promises the bird, and takes off at trot for the house, ignoring the uneven spots in the path in his haste. He skids into the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.

“Mum! Mum! You’ve got a letter by owl post and it’s really really tired and out in the shed!”

His Mum looks up from the grey dishwater and soap scum in the sink and blinks. She glances at the envelope, smiles a rare mere flicker of a smile and, to Severus’ intense disappointment, stuffs it in a pocket for later reading.

“I see…well, give me my wand back and let’s not keep my letter carrier waiting for an early Boxing Day benefice.” He hands her the wand and she goes to the junk drawer in the china cabinet by the ice box. She digs out a blown fuse, a length of twine and a paper sack that’s been folded flat for reuse.

“Take this bowl of water and this old dish towel, Severus.”

He does as he’s told even though he’s consumed with curiosity about Who Magical might have sent Mum a letter. He’s never seen a real post owl before up close, just the moving pictures in Mum’s storybooks.

Mum makes sure the shed door is firmly shut and the blackout curtain pulled across the window before she transforms the fuse into a dead but still warm mouse, the twine into a live vole over which she mutters a petrifying charm and the paper sack into a box with pine chips and dead grass shavings.

She has Severus put the dish of water next to the two rodents and enlarges the dishtowel into a blanket sized pile of cloth. She applies a localized warming charm to the makeshift nest in the corner while the owl bestirs itself and hoots gratefully before bolting down the mouse like a man throwing back a shot. It trundles like a geriatric goblin over to the dishtowel to settle down.

“Take all the time you need to recover, Hrattvaeng. I thank you and I appreciate you finding me. I’ll have a reply for your mistress tomorrow. Severus will bring you more food and water in the morning, _slepp vel_.”

The owl hunkers down a bit more and is out faster than the shed light. Mum picks up the laundry basket Severus forgot and hefts it onto one hip. She pulls the shed door shut and for good measure puts an overnight _confundus_ spell on the handle so the owl won’t be accidentally disturbed.

“Did you tell it to sleep well in German or Dutch?” he asks when they’re back inside the kitchen.

“Icelandic and Hrattvaeng is a female owl, they’re a bit larger than the males of that species.”

“She came all the way from Iceland with a letter for you?”

“Anna has shown her how to hitch rides on ships bound for Scotland or Ireland so she doesn’t needlessly exhaust herself going the whole distance in one leg. Or on two wings, I guess you might say.”

“Who’s Anna, mum?”

“Ah, that’s a good story for solstice tomorrow. Here’s your blanket, my Prince,” Mum says, and piles the coverlet into his arms and plops Roald Dahl’s book on top. He goes upstairs, trailing a woolen corner snakelike behind him. It’s just barely gone seven o’clock, but she knows damn well he’ll stay up reading his book in his bedroom until at least half-eight while she reads her precious letter and then finishes _The Daughter of Time_ in her favorite fireside wingback armchair.

Severus is careful to make sure his bedside lamp is turned off before his father can be expected home once the pub stops serving drinks. He doesn’t want a thrashing for disobeying his Mum, or whatever other excuse Da would manufacture if he saw Severus’ light on and wanted to wallop him.

 

**Faithful friends who are dear to us  
December 20, 1968 7:15 pm**

_16 December, 1968_

_Eileen, dear friend,  
I’m going to be in Konungsgurtha --York, I should say, as of the end of December and hoped we might get together there to catch up on our lives in person. A collector in my subject area died recently and I’m one of four book and manuscript dealers in Northern European runes they invited to come over to England to sort through his library and make purchase offers on his very extensive collection on Ancient Nordic scripts. Can you tell how much this opportunity makes this book dealer salivate in anticipation?!_

_Why not take a short holiday –if you can get away from that simian Muggle hubby of yours, that is. Surely you can sweet talk him into making his own meals for a few days? If he says no, how about a nice petrificalis followed by confundus et tempus obscuram with obliviate as a chaser?_

_I know, I know, your British Ministry is a lot stricter than we are about such things._

_Can you get the money to get your train tickets north? I can cover your other expenses._

_If you want to bring your boy (it sounds like he takes after his mother with his brains and I would love to meet him) I’m sure we can find something to interest him for a few days. There are several books I’ll bring for his late Christmas gift, some things for you, and there are some magical sites to visit here as well. I am sending this to you on Jane Austen’s birthday with my Sólstöður/Yule greetings and my best wishes for a wonderful new year to you and young Severus._

_(A thousand death shrouds on he-whom-you-married, may trolls devour his abusive hands and feet, may harpies squabble over his intestines while he yet breathes, may salamanders burn his hair and snack on his scalp skin like a bag of crisps. Too bad I stunk at the cursing part of my school’s curriculum or you’d have been a very young widow years ago and your laws be damned. But I digress.)_

_If you are able to come, send a letter by return owl and if not, send me a letter anyway. If you can’t join me, I’ll send your gifts in January to you the usual way._

_I will meet you two under the schedule board in the main train station on the 30th December at noon unless I hear otherwise._

_Liberty, Amity and Livres toujours,_  
your friend Anna  
Suthergata St.  
Reykjavik, Iceland

 

**In the Bleak Midwinter  
December 21, 1968 3:42 a.m.**

He wakes up the middle of the long night, happy for the extra blanket around his ears. The end of his nose is cold and he breathes into his cupped hands to warm it, wishing he hadn’t inherited his Da’s huge beak. There’s an eerie tapping of ice pellets against his window. The fingernails of malevolent dead souls or banshees might make such a noise, he bets. The panes rattle a bit in the wind.

It’s a very good night to be inside where it’s warm, to curl up like an owl in a nest and hunker down while the storm blows around the sagging gutters of their roof. He hopes Hrattvaeng will let him pet her tomorrow, so he can see how soft her feathers are. He checked his almanac before he went to sleep. She travelled almost 1800 kilometers, if she came from somewhere near Reykjavik.

To put himself back to sleep, he thinks about all the words that begin with I that he can come up with. He knows his habit of listing things will put him to sleep long before he gets too far in the alphabet.

There are a lot of ice-related ones. Icicles, ice dams, ice floes, ice cream, Ireland, island (ile in French) and Iceland with its fire salamanders, volcanoes and geysers and ancient language. I is for the pronoun for oneself. I is for idiot, imbecile, ignoramus and ill-advised and illness and influenza, which had carried off his Da’s mother in the 1920s.

There is Iris the Greek rainbow goddess, and iris the flower and the iris of an eye. Add an H at the end and it became Irish. Mum says you have to pay attention to details, that a mispronounced word can totally change an incantation like the difference between using an herb’s flower versus its roots can completely change a potion, causing a cauldron to explode. He finds homonyms interesting now that he’s having spelling tests at school. He’s very good at spelling.

There’s inn like “no room at the inn” for Mary and Joseph and in as a place, “born in a manger.” They talked about Christmas at school last week and how different people around the world celebrate Christmas. His teacher ignored his question when he asked what about people who weren’t Christian, like Jews and Celts and Roman soldiers who worshipped Mithras before Jesus lived, how did they celebrate the returning of the light at wintertime?

Sometimes he likes to ask questions that he knows will unsettle his teachers. Mostly, he keeps quiet except when called upon, so he doesn’t have to write lines for being impertinent. Another I word. He might be an impertinent brat to his Da, but when he’s grown, he wants to be thought of as intelligent and intense and…impressive. On that note, he rolls over, pulls the bedclothes up to his ears and drifts off to sleep again.

 

**Joy shall be yours in the morning  
December 21, 1968, 8:44 a.m.**

The tea kettle’s whistle wakes him. It’s not a school day, they have off for over a week for Christmas hols so he’s allowed to have a bit of a lie-in. When he opens his eyes, he looks for a while at the greying slanted ceiling and traces the plaster cracks to the far reaches of the room, until he braces himself for the cold air he’ll encounter, stretches, shoves his socked feet into slippers and heads for the loo. Teeth brushed and bladder emptied, he quickly changes from his pajamas and out of the woolen but shabby sleep-socks. Mum knit them over a year ago so they’ve stretched out some.

He shivers and throws on an undershirt and pants and, heedless of clashing colors, puts on a maroon polo neck, brushes his fine limp hair, and then layers on his favorite pullover. It’s an acid green that he likes to think of as venom green. It’s getting a bit short in the arms and tight in the torso and Mum’s not sure if it will hold another extension spell without unravelling.

He suspects a pullover in an obnoxious colour like mustardy yellow that makes his skin look more sickly than usual, or worse, one that’s red, may be among his Christmas gifts. He doesn’t like red. It attracts attention and makes it hard for him to escape the bullies’ notice in the schoolyard or classroom. A pair of trousers, newer wool socks and beaten up shoes that were his “good shoes” a year back complete his day’s ensemble.

He heads downstairs and politely bids Da good morning, quietly so he doesn’t make a hungover Tobias wince and lash out. Severus sits at the table with his head down, hair in his eyes and doesn’t say anything except “thanks Mum” when she slides a fried egg and last night’s sausage and a bit of potato mash onto his plate and brings him his tea, milk with two sugars.

Tobias is downing a second mug of builders tea, dark as his eyes and temper. He gnaws absentmindedly on a piece of buttered toast as he reads about the threatened labour strikes in Northern Ireland. He turns the pages, flicking them like an irritable cat twitches its tail before it pounces and scratches.

After a half-hour’s seething at the _Cokeworth Chronicle’s_ prose and editorials Tobias tells Eileen not to keep lunch for him, he’ll get something at the workingman’s club where he’ll be shooting snooker and talking with the lads.

Eileen looks at him and says, “Yes, Toby. May your long-odds horses win and your gold flow.” Her hand twitches in her apron pocket where she keeps her wand. He looks at her oddly, shakes his head like he’s confused and then, as an afterthought, he says, “Here’s the household money for the fortnight, along with a bit extra I got as a holiday bonus,” as he hands her some bank notes and stomps off. The house’s very walls seem to sigh once he’s gone.

Severus looks up at his mum, shaking his hair out of his face. “What did you _do_ to him? And why did you give him a Goblin farewell?”

His mum lets out a short bark of a laugh and puts the money in her apron pocket. “I had some _Felix Felicis_ left, saved for an opportune moment-- he got it in his tea and I had some in my tea. The bets he thinks I don’t know about him making should bring in enough extra money to sweeten his temper when he finds out you and I have gone to York for a few days after Christmas without him.”

“We’re taking a trip? Just us? Truly?” He wants to act grownup, but he can’t help but bounce in his chair.

His only trip away from Cokeworth had been when he was four and Tobias had a great-uncle die. They attended the funeral, but unfortunately several family members were mentioned in the will, so Tobias’ portion was only enough to fix some roof leaks that were beyond the help of discreet _Reparo_ spells and to cover a few small household repairs.

“Yes, my Prince. Now go feed Hrattvaeng, and I’ll tell you our travel plans and about my friend Anna.” Eileen doesn’t bother with doing the clean up the long way by hand—a few quick household charms and the dishes are clean and dry and floated to the cabinet, the table surface is cleaned of crumbs and the floor mopped.

Severus takes the potato peelings scraps out to the compost pile. He goes out to the shed with a bowl containing another transfigured bit of string turned into a large mouse and a large mug of water for Hrattvaeng’s water bowl.

She looks a lot less disheveled by the light of day, so she’s been up long enough to preen her feathers into better shape and her eyes are far more alert. She hoots softly at him as he carefully sets down her breakfast.

“Here you go, Hrattvaeng,” he says, trying to recall and imitate his mother’s pronunciation. “Mum’s got another mouse for you and I’ve got fresh water. You _slepp vell_?”

He crouches down and rearranges the sleep-flattened cloth so it’s more circular and fluffy. The owl bobs her head and eats the mouse in very few swallows. She then hops over to where he’s crouched and puts her head under his hand. Very carefully he trails his long fingers over her head, back and wings. She does feel soft, but some of her feathers feel springy, too. Her talons are long and look wickedly sharp.

“You must be a terribly strong flier, I looked up how far it was between Coventry and Iceland and you’ve come a really long way. That must be one important letter,” Severus tells the owl. The bird nods again and dismissively turns her back on him and returns to her temporary nest for another nap, so he leaves her to it.

 

**December 21, 1968  
Late morning**

Eileen writes a quick note in reply, that she and Severus will be in York to meet Anna in the station.

She makes two cups of tea for herself and Severus and tells him about the day in Paris she met a salamander familiar and his mistress. She’d been intrigued by the offerings at a Monmartre street fair bookstall, some years after World War II had ended.

“It was a heady time to be in Paris, my Prince. There were suddenly no rations on fabric and Dior took advantage of it, fitted bodices with very long and full skirts. Paris was full of lively people trying to shake off the sorrows of war by buying things, going to glamourous clubs. And of course a woman in a dazzling dress needs a tempting perfume as well, _non_? I was an apprentice at Caron, the company that made _Or et Noir_ ,” she began, blowing on the surface of her tea.

“I couldn’t afford all the furs and diamonds, but I could buy books. The salamander I encountered, Oriflamme, was the familiar of Anna Sigurdardottir, the booth’s owner. We struck up a conversation about books, runes in Icelandic magic and French perfume and we agreed to meet for coffee at the nearby Wizard café, _Le Griffon D’Or_.

I had a few acquaintances in school, but some had died, some had gotten busy with a career or married and no one wanted to associate with the sister of a defeated dark wizard. Anna didn’t know or care about Hogwarts and house rivalries. It was such a relief to just talk with another single witch, another foreigner making her home in Paris.”

Most of the time the salamander had curled up happily, napping in the embers of a small charcoal brazier that heated the stall, but it had condescended to sit in Eileen’s hand for a snack. It was almost too hot to hold, even with an Asbestos skin charm in place.

It consumed the bit of amber Eileen had offered it from her necklace of chunky yellow beads. A fragrant resinous smell from its satisfied burp, (accompanied by a wisp of smoke and a few sparks) had lingered on her fingers for days, even after she’d washed her hands several times.

Mum shows him the small flame like scar its flickering tail had left on her forefinger as it dove back into the flames after its nuncheon. Mum said Anna told her that Oriflamme liked her – it only burned her a little because it was very partial to Baltic amber.

“Will I get to see Oriflamme, Mum?”

“Salamanders have to stay in fire most of the time, so I expect Anna will leave him home. There’s a magma seam not far from her farmhouse just outside a small town north of Reyjavik. She’s promised to show us around magical York and there’s a concert of lessons and carols at the Cathedral we’ll go to,” she replies.

“Music like Da’s music?” he asks, scowling. He didn’t like rock music much. Folk was tolerable. BBC’s classical offerings he mostly ignored. They usually listened to the Queen’s Christmas address, though.

“Much older music than that, it’s almost magical, you’ll see what I mean when you hear it.”

That afternoon when it’s dim with twilight, he takes Mum’s letter of reply to Anna out to the shed and carefully ties it around Hrattvaeng’s leg. He opens the shed door, she looks at him and hoots.

“Goodbye, girl, _örugg ferð_ “ says Severus, and ushers her outside. With a few hops and flaps of her wings she takes off, a shrinking speck heading into the grey north. He watches her until she disappears and then dumps the litter box out near the compost pile, picks up the empty bowls and cloth and brings them inside.


	3. The Holly and the Ivy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slytherin Christmas trees and Runic sweets...

**The Holly and the Ivy  
December 22, 1968**

The first full day of winter Eileen and Severus carry (with a discreet _Mobilarbes_ spell) a potted conifer into their sitting room. Da bosses Severus once he’s finished untangling the strings of lights, replacing three dead bulbs.

“Electronics is a man’s job,” he tells Severus. “I leave the cooking to your Mum and you’ll do the ornaments this year, you’re tall enough.” He’s in a pretty good mood, the horses he bet on all placed, if not won.

Tobias nurses an ale as Severus carefully unrolls last year’s newspaper’s which hold the delicate glass bells from Germany and his mother’s family. There are also clip on birds with glittery wings, walnut shells covered in gold foil with velvet ribbons and an eggshell ornament, hollowed out with a pair of tiny carolers inside.

A salt dough ornament he made last year is a layer down in the box. He insisted on painting Father Christmas with forest green robes, not the usual red, which resulted in a mixed report from his art teacher—“Severus doesn’t always follow directions, but his creativity should be encouraged.”

He smirks a little as he hangs the green ornament, and tries to imagine what a Slytherin house Christmas tree might look like—all silver and green, delicate metal and glass coils of snakes, wooden Welsh green dragons with teeny figures of Gryffindors held in their mouths. It would have pointed silver stars and garlands, maybe throwing stars and green ribbons holding bunches of mistletoe and hellebore…

He turns to check if Tobias has any directions about where the silvered mercury glass globes should go, but his Da is lightly snoring in his chair, an empty glass on the side table. Severus shrugs, and after some calculation, distributes the balls amidst the tree branches. They can reflect his father’s favorite chair with their mirrored surfaces and serve as a few seconds warning if he wakes up mad and Severus needs to dodge his hand.

He calls to Mum to come see how the tree looks. Eileen sticks her head out through the kitchen door way. She approves and tells him to put holly and mistletoe about the doors and at the windows. He know that it is to set wards about the house. Afterwards, she’ll go around and add her magic to the seasonal greenery.

“Will Hrattvaeng get home in time for Christmas?” he asks quietly, so as not to wake Tobias.

“Very nearly, I suspect. Don’t fret, child, she’s a very intelligent bird. Why don’t you go read up on runes—not their divination uses, but their other applications in binding and ward fortifications?”

Severus darts up the stairs and brings down a book on runes. To his father, it looks like an old copy of _The Railway Children_. He settles in at the kitchen table with a mug of tea Mum makes him and enjoys the smells of supper cooking, a beef stew (low on the beef, heavy on the veg) and the comforting aroma of thick crusty bread baking that will sop up the stew’s liquids.

 

**Have a holly jolly Christmas  
December 23, 1968**

Mum is baking many dozen biscuits. There are some for the carolers who will be by tomorrow night and some for the family to snack on before Christmas dinner which is goose, potatoes, kale from the garden, bread, trifle and plum pudding. She’s also planning which foods Tobias can easily reheat while she and Severus are away in York.

Severus finishes most of the _Beginner’s Runes_ and is reading an American book for kids that Anna had sent for his birthday last year that had been on his shelf of “books to read when I’m older.” _A Wrinkle in Time_ even has witches in it and a snake. The Murrays seem a bit like his family in that other people think they’re weird, especially Charles Wallace.

Last week Mum pulled out more books—so he has a pile by his bed—Dickens’ _Christmas Carol_ with its ghosts, the thin book with a poem _A Child’s Christmas in Wales_ , Serendy’s _White Stag _, _The Night before Christmas_ __ and from his paternal grandmother, a hymnal with carols and a book about St. Nicholas and Father Christmas.

Besides the Christmas books, there are the stories Eileen thinks of as winter-time ones, that are haunting reads when darkness falls by three in the afternoon and dawn is just a paler shade of grey. These include Icelandic tales from the Edda of Fenrir devouring Odin at Ragnarok, stories about the sacrifice of the Holly King and the Ivy King, each in turn in his appointed season. The stories tell Severus that noble causes don’t make for automatic victors, and that time washes away even the names of real people, turning them into legends or place names.

“What’s Anna like?” he asks Mum when he finishes a chapter and marks his place. She didn’t attend Hogwarts, so he has no shorthand of stereotypes to guess what sort of a person Anna might be. Some people, like Da, act different when they’re at home versus High Street where everyone can see them.

A good question, my prince,” she replies, wiping her floury hands on her apron. “She’s never been married, no children. She’s older than me and has run her rare book business for more than 30 years, even during the last world war. She is very blunt about telling me I married a mistake of a man, but she’s a good enough friend that she stays in touch with me by post a few times a year. She’s sent me money for your birthday gifts in the past and is looking forward to meeting you, I’ve told her about you.”

She pauses for a minute and thinks some more as she peeks into the oven to see how the latest batch of biscuits is coming along.

“She’s helped her nieces and nephews obtain university scholarships with her coaching. She’s a Rune mistress, loves music, Wizard or muggle makes no difference to her. She has a side business as a curse breaker of medieval and earlier artifacts. Ask her to tell you about the reindeer horn runes and spell that stumped her for nearly a year until a squib and a reindeer animagus helped her sort it out."

Mum sets him to cutting up vegetables as she removes the sugary treats from the oven and puts in yet another batch. The carolers come to all the houses in their neighborhood on Christmas Eve each year, and she’s not going to be shamed on her street by having nothing to give them.

Some muggle traditions she cleaves to, like the wassailers getting food and drink as a reward for their songs, and not airing her family’s dirty laundry (actual and metaphoric) in public. Other habits like church attendance or sending her son to fetch his father from the pub nightly are rituals she ignores.

When the second batch has cooled, Severus frosts them.

“Practice makes perfect. Do a few practice ones and then decorate two dozen with one rune apiece and we’ll bring them with us as a gift for Anna, under a stasis spell and wax paper in a tin.”

Severus makes an S on a biscuit for himself that gets blobby, so he decides it can be a snake. The letter E goes on another one which he hands to his mum with a little bow.

She quirks a corner of her mouth at him. “Wouldn’t want you to be forgetting the man of the house, my little snake. Himself might get upset.”

He squinches up his nose in disgust, picks the smallest biscuit and glops a messy T on it for Da. It’s more than he deserves. He sets it aside on a saucer and turns to the page in his book showing the runes. He sets to work, tongue sticking out between his lips as he concentrates on Jera so the tips of each part don’t meet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Holly and the Ivy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57l6dSbVppM  
> Have a Holly Jolly Christmas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVMCUtsmWmQ


	4. Here we come a-Wassailing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Snapes welcome carolers to their home, including the Evans sisters...

**December 24, 1968 7:36 pm**

The carolers can be heard long before their torches and an old fashioned railway lantern carried by an adult are seen. There are a dozen children of all sizes, with Mrs. Pridgedon and a woman with unremarkable brown hair serving as chaperones. Severus recognizes the Pridgedon clan, of course, and exchanges wary nods with two boys he knows from his maths class. They sing “Deck the Halls” and follow up with “Greensleeves” and “The Wassail Song”.

The children look a bit nervous as Eileen invites them inside. The Snapes, mother and son, have a neighborhood reputation for being more than a bit “odd” what with their old fashioned turns of phrase and Severus’ clothes which are clearly second hand or fashioned from his parents’ cast offs.

The kids shuffle in and crowd into the small entry hall for treats. Eileen hands around mugs of eggnog and Severus is entrusted with passing a large plate piled with biscuits. Since they are at the end of the street, the Snapes are the final stop of the neighborhood. Once they’re done here, the majority of singers will pile into cars parked a few streets over and serenade people on the better side of town, and then disperse to their homes.

The platter down to two biscuits, Severus approaches the two girls who are sticking close to their brunette mother.

“You’re Petunia and Lily, right? I think I’ve seen you in the park,” he says, surprising himself and his mother with his show of friendliness as he hands each a biscuit. Mum’s probably worrying he’ll get sorted into Hufflepuff at this rate.

“Yes, we are,” says Petunia bossily. "This is our Mum, Mrs. Evans.” She doesn’t introduce Severus to her mother in turn.

Mrs. Evans takes a final sip of her eggnog and smiles tentatively at Severus’ mother. “I give a lot of the children piano lessons and Mrs. Pridgedon is choirmistress at the Methodist Chapel on Melbourne Road if you’d like to attend services, Mrs. Snape. Maybe you’d like Severus to learn the piano?”

“Perhaps, I’ll think on it,” says Eileen, not quite quashing the suggestion as she begins gathering mugs from those who have finished.

Severus turns to Lily boldly and says, “Are you having a good holiday?”

Her face lights up. “Oh it’s been grand, we’ve had singing and baking and new clothes for Christmas Day services and candles at supper and I just love Christmas! What do you love about it?”

A number of inappropriate responses that would get him smacked by Mum and whipped by Da go through Severus’ head. He looks closely at her. She’s actually curious about what he thinks.

He says quietly, “I think it’s the wind blowing in the cold dark that seems to sing sad songs if you listen hard enough. In the day time, it’s maybe the traditions we all weave year after year into a pattern.”

She stops mid-bite on a biscuit. “I like that idea a lot,” she declares decisively. “I’ll listen to the wind tonight and Christmas night and New Year’s Eve and tell you what I hear. Will you tell me about patterns when we’re back at school?”

“If you like,” says Severus awkwardly, trying to sound like it’s nothing important. He’s still not sure why he’s talking with her instead using of his default communication modes of sullen silence or surly monosyllables. Her eyes are very very green, like spring grass in the park or the spiky leaves of crocus bulbs his mum grows for pinches of saffron.

Petunia sniffs dismissively. She darts a glance at their mother, who is busy rewrapping scarves around the necks of the younger singers. Knowing she won’t be overhead, she says, “You don’t want people to think you’re a weirdo like him, Lily.”

Lily sticks out her tongue at her sister and says, “Mummy didn’t leave you in charge of who I choose as my friends. So there, bossy-pants.”

“Bratty baby,” hisses Petunia and turns her back on her sister and puts on her coat and stomps outside.

“See you in school?” Lily asks Severus, as she pulls on her mittens in a businesslike fashion.

“Maybe, I dunno,” he says, suddenly shy.

His mother shoots him the Where are Your Manners Look across the hallway. He stands up straight and says politely, “Happy Christmas Lily, see you next year. Happy Christmas, Mrs. Evans.”

“You too! Bye, Severus!” Lily says, pulling a red and green hat over her orange hair and bounces out the door with the rest of the carolers.

Mother and son look at each other over the debris of crumbs on the platter and in the cheap carpet. Eileen has eight mugs hooked over her fingers and an odd expression on her face.

“I suppose that went off well. Another year of trying to live down being the freaks of Spinners Lane, eh?”

Severus isn’t sure how to answer that. He doesn’t get truly new clothes that often. His mum’s blouses have been altered into shirts for him on occasion. Most of the carolers’ families have more money that his family does and nicer houses. Their fathers don’t work in factories like Da. They’re professional men with university degrees or respectable tradesmen like Mr. Pridgedon.

So he says instead, “They always like your biscuits, Mum, and the adults, even the Methodists, appreciate the brandy you splash in their eggnog.”

His mum’s gaze sharpens. “And what’s suddenly so entrancing about Mrs. Evans’ youngest, my boy?”

Severus flushes. “I’m… not certain. Do you think she could be one of us? She seems so much more… alive than her sister or mum.”

“Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. But until you see her do something magic, don’t tell your secrets or mine, is that understood?”

He nods reluctantly. She looks at him fiercely, and enunciates clearly, “Severus… _do you understand_?”

“Yes, mum, I won’t say anything about magic, unless I know she’s a witch,” he promises.

Mum is almost as scary as Da when she gets angry. Maybe she’s even scarier, because in his world, she’s the one who doesn’t rage, break things or curse fluently. She stews a lot, like a noxious bitter potion on constant simmer, but she doesn’t usually boil over because of something he’s done.

“So, do you pine for piano lessons or yearn to sing boy soprano solos in a choir?” she asks, half-mockingly.

He shakes his head violently. “I wouldn’t have time to learn what I need to know for Hogwarts as well as my regular school work if I had to practice all the time.”

“I’m pure blood, but not made of money, my boy. I’m not investing in a time turner for you, that’s for certain. That’s a sure way to run yourself exhausted and into a bad illness.”

“I can’t see how learning to play music is helpful to me. You can always enchant an instrument to play,” Severus points out.

“ I agree. But you should know how to fight, both Muggle style and magical. A wizard wouldn’t expect a knife or a kick to the bollocks in a close fight, and that could be the winning difference. I think maybe you and your Da are going to bond over boxing at the workingman’s club in the new year,” she says meditatively, ignoring Severus’ groan.

He hates doing anything with his father, it is just another opportunity to get mocked for talking too posh and sounding like a poofter, which usually gets followed by a smack to his head or mouth. Having Da associate him with punching bags is just not on. He knows better than to argue with Mum when she’s in this sort of scheming mood, though, so he says goodnight and goes upstairs to his room.

It’s cold up there, and he changes hastily into his pajamas and woolly sleep socks. He really hopes Mum reconsiders the idea of boxing lessons. He’s been in a few fights already after school when some imbecile has called his Da a mean drunken bastard or his Mum the Witch of Spinner’s Lane.

Both slurs are mostly true, but it’s not right for anyone outside their family to go hurling such insults in his hearing. He dives in and his long arms and legs are an advantage when it comes to kicking and holding off blows or landing them. He knows better than to scuffle when teachers or other adults are nearby. You don’t stay unnoticed with a reputation for trouble-making. However, if someone shows up with a few bruises at school it’s ignored as an example of “boys will be boys” or “parental discipline.”

He settles under the quilt and blankets. The wind isn’t that strong tonight, it doesn’t moan or sing. Instead it whispers of the end of things. It is the end of the year, 1968 lies comatose, mere days from death. He wonders what the end of the century will be like. He’ll be 40 soon after the year 2000 starts. That sounds so far away, it’s very hard to imagine. He can imagine himself being taller and maybe knowing how to act polite, like an adult, without Mum’s reminders, but how do you know when you’re grown-up? Do you feel different and then know you’re grown up?

Severus can’t come up with a satisfying answer to that question, so he turns to his comforting lists. He’s tired of ice, so he decides to go to the letter J. J is for January and his birthday. Juvenile is a J word, often followed by delinquent. Jelly legs jinx, juniper, jaundice, jolly, jokes (he’s over heard a few gross but funny ones at school), junior and jasmine. J’s not good for insults aside from jerk and jackass, so he moves on.

K is King Wenceslas, and K’s the Killing Curse, A-something Kedavra which he wishes he could use on his father when he beats Severus and his mum. K is for krill, they studied ocean life recently and about whales, barnacles, octopus, fish, oysters, shrimp and lobsters.

Lobster, a good L word. Rich people eat lobster and drink champagne. Lilacs, lavender, love-in-a-mist, lettuce leaves, lacewings, Liverpool, lotions, lilies… Lily. He stops short in his listing.

Why did she smile at him tonight? Did it mean anything? Maybe she likes him enough she might actually want to be his friend. He doesn’t rely on people keeping their promises, but maybe this new season will bring new and better things when he’s nine, a magical number, three times three. Maybe he’ll have a real friend.


	5. On Christmas Day in the Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Christmas, as with every day in the Snape household, the worlds of muggle and magic do not happily coexist. Efforts are made to celebrate, however.

**On Christmas Day in the Morning**

**December 25, 1968 8:40 a.m.**

He wakes to the sound of his father slamming his feet down onto the floor into slippers and the banging of water pipes in the bathroom. He knows he can malinger in bed for at least a half-hour. It’s a holiday, so Da will bother to shave after his quick bath, even though his five o’clock shadow will show up by three.

Tobias downs three aspirin with the hangover potion that Eileen left for him. She’s never told him it is a muggle-modified pepper-up potion, and he makes sure not to look at his face in the mirror while taking it so that he can ignore the steam drifting out of his ears. That way it could be steam from the hot water he's using for shaving. He doesn’t mind avoiding pain and the head pounding that sounds too much like the heavy machinery clanging that he’s forced to endure hearing during the work week. He just doesn’t need visual proof that his wife and his son are freakishly different from his coworkers’ families.

Even drinking makes certain things hard to forget, like his anger that his life hasn’t gone the way he expected. He should have been promoted to at least a shift supervisor by now. His little woman wasn’t at all who he thought she was when he met her and won her over. No amount of smacking her into line seems to make her normal. The weirdness in her just keeps popping up in different unforeseeable ways, as it does in their boy. He sees as some sort of reproach from a higher power that he wasn't able to get more than a single morose child out of her. 

His parents, good church-going folk, believed in _spare the rod, spoil the child_ so he got beaten regularly when he misbehaved as a kid or even showed signs in that direction. He turned out okay, he thinks, as he zips his trousers and goes downstairs after thumping on Severus’ door to get the lazy bugger moving.

The three of them sit down to Christmas breakfast, which is like any other breakfast, except there are biscuits to go with the tea as a treat. After eating, Tobias goes for a stroll in the garden while he smokes his first cigarette of the day. He squints at the Christmas rose in the shady corner, which, like clockwork each year, had flowers that budded yesterday and came into full bloom this morning. What fucking use is having magic power if you use it for stupid things like making plants grow instead of making money or ruling the world?

Inside, Severus helps Eileen clean up the dishes. Looking out the window he sees his father snap a bloom off the hellebore bush and grind it under his shoe.

“Did you want me to get some Christmas roses before Da destroys them all, Mum?” he asks. He knows everything except the _Helleborus niger'_ s roots are toxic and can cause symptoms ranging from vomiting and throat and tongue swelling to cardiac arrest. Too bad Tobias didn't try to eat it. They could bury his body under the shed's floor.

“I harvested some of it long before the two of you were up.” She snorts as she watches Tobias pull off another dark blossom and stomp on it. “In flower language Christmas Rose means: Relieve my anxiety. I don’t think that’s how Victorian lovers meant it, but he’s certainly taking out his frustrations and anxieties on that plant.”

“Better a plant than us,” says Severus sharply and puts away the blue and white platter that is decorated with a scene of wizards on camels near the Pyramids and Sphinx. His favorite is the teacup with the scene of a cobalt blue Icelandic volcano captured mid-eruption in the eighteenth century.

“Other people’s china shows English country views or that clichéd Blue Willow scene,” Mum told him once. “Ours was a wedding gift to me and has depictions of important magic sites where ley lines cross and meet.”

Tobias only smokes one cigarette before he comes in and Severus relaxes fractionally. Dad’s level of impatience can often be calibrated by how many he smokes first thing in the morning. One is fine, two is a warning and three means that Severus better lie low and put notice-me-not charms on himself and his things. Even better is getting out of the house altogether and going for a several hours ramble along the murky river and around town. Mum gave him a beacon charm last summer. If the stone in his pocket gets almost uncomfortably warm, he’s wanted at home.

They settle in the parlor around the Christmas tree and sort out the presents until the three of them each have a pile of brightly wrapped boxes.

He was right, he got a jumper. At least the color’s a good one, a deep forest green, not, thank Merlin, a red one. He gets a hat and gloves that Mum knit him to match, with black stripes on the end of the cap and wrists of the gloves. Since he rarely sees her knitting, he suspects his jumper owes its existence to crafting charms or self-knit spells.

There’s also an old dress of Mum’s she’s converted into a grey vest with lots of pockets for him. It will hold rocks, coins, charms materials and random things like a five leafed clover he found. Some of his finds end up in the kitchen junk drawer or displayed on the shelves in his bedroom until his growing library crowds them out.

Mum sets a larger box aside for him and says, “open this one last.”

The gifts labelled “from Da” include a black belt and heavier thick soled winter boots. A small box snaps open to reveal a very grown up looking wrist watch with a black leather band and Roman numerals that he puts on immediately.

He knows Mum took the time and trouble to buy the gifts, but he’s no fool so he mimics a smile by baring his teeth at Da and thanking him profusely for the watch.

“It’s just like yours, Da, that’s so neat!” he exclaims, knowing Tobias would like his son to be his carbon copy and imitate him. Flattery is a small price to pay for a calm Christmas day.

His stocking contains an orange, walnuts, and some chocolates and a pocket knife like Boy Guides have with all those extra fold out tools.

His big gift from Mum is a potion kit for beginners. It’s under a glamour to look Muggle so Tobias doesn’t smash it. “My first chemistry set” proclaims the box lid, which shows two alarmingly cheerful boys with unnatural fixed smiles bent over a smoking test tube. Underneath them the manufacturer promises _“It’s Educational! Magic! Fun!”_

“Use that out in the garden shed so you don’t burn the house down,” Tobias orders in a growl.

“Yes, sir,” parrots Severus and watches as his Da opens his pile of presents.

Boring.  
Predictable.  
New clothing, new shoes.

Severus signed his name on a box of several handkerchiefs to help combat the colds and sinus problems the factory work gives Da. Mum knit him a balaclava so his nose doesn’t freeze on the walks to and from work and the pub.

Mum’s pile is smaller than Tobias’ or Severus’. Tobias gives Eileen a couple of romance novels—“Snodgrass’ wife likes these things, so I thought you might, too,” he explains, referring to his supervisor’s wife.

Mentally, Severus shakes his head in exasperation. After all these years married to Eileen the man still doesn’t know that she finds romance novels improbable and silly and goes more for P.D. James or Ian Fleming than Mills and Boone?

“It’s a nice thought, Toby,” says Eileen and pats his hand absentmindedly as she turns her attention to Severus’ gift.

He found an old dried flower pin with a rock crystal cover over it in a junk store a few months back for a 10p. Prying it open, he took the old greying flower out and put in three of the four leaf clovers he’d found last summer and pressed into a dictionary to dry.

“It’s for luck in the new year,” he tells Mum as she gives him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

It will go well on the lapel of the dark green coat she bought herself for their York expedition later this week.


	6. Rambles in the Shambles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus explores bookshops in York and makes a few discoveries

December 30, 1968  
11:45 a.m.

They linger near the main notice board of the train station, its mechanical clacking as trains arrive and depart and schedules get updated becoming a soothing white noise against the shuffling of shoes and clicking of heels on the hard floor, the murmur of a crowd of people that pools, then flows away from where they stand. A light notice-me-not glamour drapes over them and their luggage. A shabbily dressed wizard nods at them in passing, but they seem to otherwise be the only non-Muggles in the place.

“We’re the small still center as the world whirls around us with its waves of seething humanity,” announces a woman’s voice behind them.

Severus whirls, crouched and fists clenched and Eileen freezes for a moment, then relaxes and turns around.

“Anna!” She holds out both hands, they kiss each other’s cheeks like Europeans and then hug like touchy-feely Americans.

He hopes Anna doesn’t want to hug him. Severus stands as tall and stiffly as he can, hands at his sides, dark eyes taking in his mother’s friend. She’s tall, nearly a foot of height on Mum, so maybe an inch or so below six feet tall. She looks to be in her late thirties or early forties, younger than his mother, though he knows from Mum’s story about her that she’s probably closer to seventy. Her hair is blond-white and cut in a bob that suits her strong face.

Her clothing is fine quality, wool in greys and a violet blouse. It fits too well to be second hand, altered or off the rack—(bespoke, a memory of his mother’s voice talking about Malfoys supplies the correct term). Sharp grey-blue eyes inspect him as closely as he watches her. She’s not slim nor fat, but sturdily built.

In her favor, she doesn’t ask stupid questions such as, “Oh, this must be Severus? How did he get so big?” as some adults do. He hates those asinine comments almost as much as the heavy blows to his shoulder his Da’s mates do sometimes, trying to “relate” to him in an over-hearty male fashion.

“Anna Sigurdardottir, my son Severus Snape. Severus, this is my friend, Anna Sigurdardottir,” says Eileen, introducing him with a touch of maternal pride. Severus takes Anna’s offered hand, noting a few faded salamander burns on her skin and politely bows over it as “Etiquette for all Magical Beings” suggests when one is not quite sure of the social rank of a witch to whom one is introduced.

“Excellent, Severus,” Anna says. “And if I were a muggle lady of your mother’s acquaintance?”

He holds out his right hand and carefully, gently shakes hers. “I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Sigurdardottir.”

He shoots a quick look at Mum who nods and smiles slightly. “Go ahead, you may ask her.”

“Did Hrattvaeng get home in time for Christmas?” He’s been wondering about the owl since she flew off with the reply letter from Mum to Anna.

“In time for a late afternoon snack of mice and mince pie, to be sure,” she says, pleased. “Now, let’s get you two resettled at my hotel. I’ve got you the rooms next to mine and the hotel is on a quiet street not far from the Shambles.” She holds out a dried up apple core with an R, Riadho, the rune for wagon and travel cut into the leftover flesh. “One minute to go.”

It’s a portkey, Severus realizes, as he and Eileen both reach for the fruit and are soon whirled away to a hotel alcove with their luggage.

To Severus’ mind, there’s no other word but luxurious to describe their rooms—plural—in the hotel. The carpet is very thick underfoot, the loo has marble in it with a shower stall and a bathtub. The furniture is antique, not just old like the furniture at home. The mattress on the spool bed he’s to sleep in is very comfortable and bounces satisfactorily when he jumps on it.

He sets his small pile of clothing in a single bureau drawer, places his shoes under the bureau and pads out in sock feet to find that the main room has undergone a transformation. An elegant meter high Christmas tree is perched on a table with presents under it. Some are in silver paper with black snowflakes and others are wrapped in black paper with silver snowflakes.

“Severus, get your gift for Anna,” suggests Mum. Suddenly remembering the iced biscuits at the bottom of his knapsack, Severus heads back to his room. Soon the tin and a few small packages from Mum for Anna join the pile.

“All set for a belated Yule,” says Anna, with satisfaction. “Now, would you like to have tea and talk or nap or take a walk?”

“Tea and talk,” says Eileen. “Walk about,” says Severus at the same time.

Anna laughs. “Easily enough done, for both of you.” She pulls a twenty pound note from her skirt pocket and gives it to a disbelieving Severus along with a map with bookshops and their hotel’s location marked on it. “Tomorrow we’ll visit the wizarding part of York. Today, why not go see some of the muggle stores, Severus? They’re all within 10 blocks of here.” Severus looks at his mum. She’s going to let him roam around a city he’s never been in, alone?

Anna raises an eyebrow at Eileen. “Almost nine years old. Is Polyjuice okay, no allergies?”

Eileen shakes her head. “No allergies. He's old enough to try it for the first time. Be back for supper, Severus. Say, half-past five.”

Anna hands Severus a pile of clothing and a pair of shoes . She passes the vial of Polyjuice potion to him. He retreats to the ensuite bath to down it and put on the change of clothes. He ends up looking like a brown haired, hazel eyed teenager, maybe fifteen and a foot or so taller than he is in his usual body. He’s got a black polo shirt, jeans and an Icelandic pullover in cream with shades of brown at the yoke and wrists. They all fit perfectly.

He returns to find the women pouring tea.

His deeper voice startles him when he speaks.

"Who do I look like?"

"Ah. My nephew Eric was good enough to contribute hair to my cause."

He has one more important question for her.

“May I spend all of the money, Miss Sigurdardottir?”

“Yes,” says Anna. “Of course, treat yourself.”

“You have your beacon stone?” asks Eileen. In reply, he holds it up and puts it in his satchel.  
“Have fun, don’t buy more books than you can carry.”

She knows his love of books rivals her own.

He promises not to, and leaves the hotel in a rush after consulting the map. No one accosts him, a young teenage girl smiles at him and, his face flushing, he nervously smiles back. He’s astounded when she winks at him before flouncing into a Marks and Sparks with a flip of her long, brown and very straight hair. She’s cute, but not as pretty as Lily Evans, the standard by which he judges all girls.

It’s a great afternoon, mooching and rambling about the city. He drinks more of the potion on the hour, every hour. He wanders several blocks beyond the furthest bookstore. There are all sorts of stores, many of which cater to wealthy people. He notices a chair in a window labeled Chippendale and is astounded at the price.

A bored salesgirl at a jewelry store starts chatting to him when he asks her if they have any star sapphires. He’s seen photos, but never one in person. Since no one else is in the store and her boss isn’t around, she shows him a pendant with the blue stone and its six pointed star. Then she points out emeralds from South America and opals from Australia and dark red Bohemian garnets, his birthstone. In the estate jewelry section, there’s an art nouveau pin in the shape of a snake with enameled red eyes and green scales. It costs far more than twenty pounds. For now, his clover pin for Mum will have to do. When he’s grown up and rich, or at least richer, he will buy Mum all sorts of lovely things including a cottage far, far from Cokeworth with a real conservatory and a house elf to do the cooking and cleaning.

He swings back in the direction of the hotel. He finds a book on gemstones in Waterstone’s and a pamphlet about Historic York in Smith’s. Seeing the ghosts of a legion of Roman soldiers walking through York would be very cool…

One small bookshop on a narrow lane has lots of books about Scandinavia, runes and methods of divination. He sees why it would appeal to Anna. A book entitled “ _The White Goddess_ ” looks interesting, there’s something about Ogham and runes in it. He buys that for his “to read later when I’m older shelf”.

The next place has a section of kid’s books. Half hidden by dozens of Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil titles, a glamoured book tugs at his fingers, pulling his hand to its spine. “So you want to play Quidditch?” by Adrian Prewitt shifts in and out of view, replacing “The Jolliest Term on Record” as the title. He rescues it from its muggle captivity and closes his eyes to better sense any other strands of magic in the store. He ends up in the history section, where books about all eras and nationalities are jumbled together.

“The Life of a North Country Bishop” is actually “The Care and Handling of Dark Artifacts” by Septimus Black, published in 1888. “John Jay, Colonial Lawyer” on a dusty bottom shelf reveals itself to be “Slytherins—Famed and Fortunate: a biographical reference”. He’s glad he thought to bring his satchel along. Six books would be a lot of juggle, in even a teenager’s hands.

He has seven pounds left, but he decides to save it for later. Be prepared, as the Boy Guides handbook says. Magic or not, books often contain useful maxims, and ones less obscure than Mum’s.


	7. The Lucky Bat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus encounters chopsticks for the first time at the Lucky Bat.

When he enters their hotel room, the lights are all off except for one dim lamp near the couch. Mum is sleeping in Anna’s arms, lying half atop her. He raises an eyebrow in reaction at his mum’s puffy red eyes. She cried for a long time for them to get so red.

Anna lifts one hand, finger to her lips to quiet him. He nods and retreats to his room with his printed prizes. The last dose of the polyjuice wears off about ten minutes later, a tingly feeling darting over his skin like St. Elmo’s fire on ship riggings. He’s a little tired, but otherwise fine. He changes into his usual clothes after finishing the third chapter of _Dark Artifacts_ and returns to the sitting room, padding silently on the cushy deep carpet.

His mum is stirring as Anna shakes her shoulder and pushes the dark hair away from her face.

“C’mon Eileen, wake up, _chere ami. Ton fils est ici_ and he doubtless wants his dinner.”

Embarassingly, Severus’ stomach agrees with a loud churning gurgle. Anna laughs and Severus, blushing to his ear tips, is shocked to hear his mother… giggle?

He’s familiar with her short bark of a laugh at life’s ironies and her snort that accompanies wry scornful appraisals of her husband’s many foibles. But he’s never heard her giggle, ever before.

Of course he’s also never met any of her friends before. He’s willing to let Anna bribe him some more to get further into his good graces, but already he likes the person his mum becomes when Anna is around.

He’s sent to fetch his coat and hat for the walk to the restaurant. He comes back to find Anna helping Mum on with her coat, lifting her hair free of the collar where Severus’s pin gleams.

Anna exclaims, passing her fingers over it. “How clever, Severus, you even put a bit of your magic signature in it to personalize it!”

He blinks, and feeling safe enough to appear dumb before them, says, “I did?”

“Oh yes, my Prince. Accidental magic or half deliberate, its resonance matches your aura,” says Eileen smiling at Severus and then bestowing another smile on Anna who only wears her sweater and puts a flat cap on her head. “Warming charms are enough for your mild climate," she explains, shrugging.

“So what were you thinking of when you picked the clovers and put together the pin, young master Snape?” she asks, waving her wand and muttering something in Icelandic as the lift deposits the three of them in the lobby. Severus senses a wash of magic and looks to his mother in confusion. "Localized muffliato, it'll surround us like a bubble," says Eileen.

“Dunno… I wanted the clovers to bring me luck when I picked them last summer and I thought about how the green would pick up the light flecks in Mum’s eyes. I wished for her to have lots of good luck this new year. I recited a few cantrips and charms over it,” explains Severus, now that he knows Muggles can't hear them.

“Hmm, interesting. You don’t get a wand until you go off to Hogwarts School at 11, am I correct?”

Severus nods. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve used Mum’s sometimes, of course.”

“Would you like to know which woods are a good match with your magic?” she asks.

“Yes, please!”

Eileen puts her arm companionably through Anna’s as they walk to the restaurant, Severus trotting a few paces in front of them.

“I think, Eileen, pure blood eugenics claims to the contrary, that your half-blood son is likely a very powerful wizard in the making. I have my runes with me and a few other aptitude tests I can do, if you like,” says Anna.

“It’s always interesting to watch you work, Anna,” Eileen agrees. “If Severus wishes it, of course you may. He’s old enough to start knowing his preferences at nearly nine.”

Severus turns around, and walking backwards, addresses Anna. “I would like that very much, thank you. What could you show me in only a few days?”

“An indication of your magic’s levels compared to others your age, the elements your magic works best with—if it is more light, grey or dark, what you might have an aptitude for in your courses. A reading of your star chart, young Capricorn, and some other divination—but no reading of entrails,” she finishes, winking at Eileen.

“Gods, that was a disgusting experiment.” Eileen includes Sev in their conversation with her raised voice. “She was into recreating Greek and Roman divination rituals that summer. There she is, wearing a once white, blood stained peplos, up to her elbows in guts, muttering about spotted livers and bladders and she utterly forgets how intestines’ color and consistency affect the augury. That experiment was a washout, a rank-smelling one.”

“Not for the crows, ravens, wolves and flies in the area,” points out Anna. “If we’d been in Scotland, you probably would have insisted on making haggis with it.”

“Waste not, want not,” intones Eileen with a smirk.

Severus grimaces. He’s read about the dish and can’t imagine stuffed sheep’s stomach as a delicacy. At least it’s not hákarl --the rotted, fermented shark which Icelanders consume willingly, not even being threatened at wand point.

“Stop, turn widdershins, Severus,” instructs Anna and indicates a passageway perhaps three feet across. A half dozen paces in, a red door breaks the face of the brick wall. It has a gold dragon’s head shaped doorknob and shiny brass plate engraved with a bat with curled wing tips. A tap of Anna’s wand to the bat admits them to a small landing. Wonderful smells are wafting up the cellar stairs.

Downstairs, The Lucky Bat is a bustling Chinese restaurant with wizards and witches from all over. They settle into a dark wood booth with high backed seats. Anna gracefully waves her wand, and flower-like the backs flow up to meet a few feet above their heads like a closing Venus flytrap or a snug, old fashioned railway sleeper carriage.

Eileen sniffs, draws her wand and her empty water glass changes into a wine goblet holding a sweet port. Another swish and flick and spells work to make the white table cloth black and the napkins a Christmasy Slytherin green. A candelabra materializes in the middle of the table to lend an air of festivity.

Anna rolls her eyes. “You British, so restrained.” She traces a circle, and says “ _Corona ilex et hedera ab extra_ ,” and a holly and ivy wreath encircles the candleholder’s base. “ _Visci!_ ” and a mistletoe kissing ball hangs over the table, emitting light in a milky, pearly white glow from its berries. “ _Acta non verba_ ,” she says, quirking a challenging eyebrow at Eileen.

“You act, I’d rather eat,” says Eileen.

A trio of fairies approaches their table, tinkling Christmas carols until Severus hisses a stinging curse in their direction. “Scrooge! Spoilsport! Blackheart!” they spit at him as they beat a hasty retreat and go off to bother the other patrons.

“What would you like to drink, Severus?” asks Mum, indicating the floating quill and order pad hovering by their table.

“Butterbeer?” he glances at her for permission. She nods.

“Your best firewhiskey for me, please, all of us on the same tab,” says Anna. She proceeds to order egg drop soup, hot and sour soup, spring rolls and egg rolls and pork dumplings for Severus to try since he’s never had Chinese food before. Eileen goes for the green winter melon soup. Half of the appetizers are wrapped up so they have some room for entrees.

General Tsao’s chicken, shrimp and broccoli and small corn ears on sticky rice are ordered by the women. Because he likes the name, Severus orders Happy Family.

When the food arrives, Severus looks around, wondering where the eating utensils are.

“Watch and learn, grasshopper,” says Mum and opens a red paper packet, splits a pair of wood sticks and rubs them against each other to rid them of splinters.

“What, I stab at everything with them?” he asks, as he imitates her.

“Chopsticks, not stab-sticks,” says Mum, smirking as she does at jokes so private she never shares them with her family.

“Stop teasing the child. Here, watch me,” says Anna. She arranges the ends of the chopsticks in her right hand, thumb angled between her index and middle fingers. Demurely she scoops up a single grain of rice and eats it. She looks expectantly over at Severus in challenge.

Severus goggles. It looks like he’s expected to do the culinary equivalent of creating a full blown Patronus on his first try. He looks dubiously at his fingers, wrapped awkwardly, trying to do a pincher movement that might bring the pointed ends together. He takes a fortifying gulp of his butterbeer, holding it in his other hand.

“At least try, my Prince. We’ll take pity on you and get you a fork once you’ve practiced a while,” promises his mum.

To distract him, she tells him about how she became the Gobstones champion of her year for Slytherin House for several years running at Hogwarts. Anna willingly tells him the story of the reindeer horn with the runes that refused to be deciphered. The wizard who had set up the spell at the time of Erasmus had not allowed for Anna Sigurdsdadottir’s determination to use the counterspell -- which required gathering together a team consisting of a wizard with a wolf patronus, a Runes Mistress (herself), a reindeer Animagus, a squib knowledgable about local rock formations and a highly informative reindeer who was determined to end the magically induced wasting disease of livestock in the area, including her herd.

To his surprise, he finds himself more than half-way through his dish, even allowing for his questions for Anna about the darker magic aspects of the disease curse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C’mon Eileen, wake up, chere ami. Ton fils est ici and he doubtless wants his dinner.  
> ...dear friend. Your son is here...
> 
> “Corona ilex et hedera ab extra- A holly and ivy wreath from beyond  
> “Visci!” -mistletoe  
> Acta non verba- Actions, not words


	8. The head of a golden dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus finds traces of magic in things Muggle...

Chapter 8:  
December 30, 1968  
7:47 pm, York England

Anna leads them down Gillygate and turns on to High Petergate, a street that dead ends into the cathedral. She points out the old city walls and the minster library to Eileen and Severus before she ushers them into the huge edifice through a door into the nave. She directs them to the left and towards the choir stalls so they’ll be able to hear the music.

“Severus, look up,” she instructs, stopping the mother and son by the left hand wall of the nave. He squints up in the dim lighting and says wonderingly “A dragon’s head?” Anna chuckles. “I suspect a squib had a good laugh creating that.”

“Why’s it there?” he asks, noting the sharply carved teeth and gilt decorations of the protruding long head.

“No one’s really sure. It has a hole through its neck and sits on a pivot. It might have been used as a mechanism for raising a font cover so a baptism could happen. This is an old gothic building, a lot of what you see here is from the 1330s.”

Severus adds it up in his head—more than six hundred years old. Old for a muggle building. Hogwarts is even older, of course. They find an empty end of a pew and settle in.

“You of course did a reconnaissance mission to find the spot with the best acoustics?” Eileen asks Anna in an aside. Anna snorts softly. “Would you expect any less of me?”

“Never, ma chere,” says Eileen in amusement and snuggles in to Anna’s side, reaching out to hold Severus’ hand, drawing him into her other side so the three of them are within reach of her warming charm in the chilly cathedral.

He wouldn’t usually do something so childish as snuggle with his mum, but he’s content to sit still, digest his food and soon, listen to the music.

The concert is part of an evensong service. It’s made up of patterns like he mentioned to Lily last week. There is the high treble of the choristers' voices, and the swelling supporting voices of the baritones and tenors echoing along the old stones, the series of rolling resounding prayers and more prayers that are part of a service that is virtually unchanged since the Renaissance.

He thinks about all the tens of thousands of voices of people repeating these wishes and hopes to a god, day after year after century, an accretion of imploring and gratitude. In this repetition is a pattern, a charm, a focus even the non-magical can attain.

No wonder this place feels different from other muggle places like railway stations or shops. The music, much of it chanting, rises and falls like a murmur of water or a wind bending around the shape of a building or moving about trees on a hillside.

There is a final prayer, “Almighty God, who hast poured upon us the new light of thine incarnate Word: Grant that the same light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.”

The congregation murmurs Amen and there is a shuffling of people gathering coats and woolen things and making their way out into the December night. Anna and Eileen and Severus sit, waiting for the crowd to disperse.

“Severus?” his mum asks after a few minutes, jostling him a bit where he is drowsing on her shoulder.

“’I’m ‘wake,” he murmurs, “they prayed for light. That’s good.”

“C’mon, wake up more, I’m not going to let Anna carry you back to the hotel.”

“I could, you know, just put a lightening charm on him, carry him on my back,” her friend joshes.

“I can walk,” he promises indignantly, rubbing his eyes, his head muzzy with the haunting music and the meditative state that the spectacle of the red and white robed choir and the candlelight flickering put him into. He doesn’t want to be carried like a baby, he’s nearly nine.

“How do you know about this?” he asks Anna, his hand gesture encompassing the whole experience.

“I have a nose for good music, maybe,” she says teasingly. “Along with my intuition about old books.”

“It’s so different from the Beatles and Herman’s Hermits,” Severus muses. “What other things are like this—muggle but elements of magic?”

“Books, coaxing plants into growing,” says his mum instantly.

“Art, poetry, old runic inscriptions,” says Anna after a pause to consider. “Emily Dickinson said, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry.”

“And I assume if I’m cold, it’s just poor central heating or a stray curse,” says Eileen, ever pragmatic.

“Oh you! Ruin my romantic worldview,” says Anna, laughing, and they make their way outside.It is cold and clear and Severus finds Orion and Cassiopea and Ursa Major in the night sky.

“The Great Wagon, the Vikings called it,” says Anna. “Or Óðins vagn, the god Odin’s Wagon.”

They continue on their way back to the warm hotel, where the soft bed welcomes Severus into its depths and medieval song patterns weave like illuminated manuscript Celtic beasts with knotted tails into his dreams. Above them all, spreads a golden dragon, that serpentine, drapes itself against a sky of glittering stars.


End file.
